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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Excellent hardware detection, great community support, Debian-based, very new versions of packages.easy to set up

Cons:

none so far

Until now I hadn't tried Ubuntu because it had a reputation as a "newbie" distro and wasn't interested in aquiring the problems such "automatic" type distros usually have.

A friend of mine tried the newest release, Hoary Hedgehog (I know, really stupid name) and he was quite impressed with it. I decided "what the heck" and gave it a test drive.

The installer is nearly identical to the Debian Sarge installer which I was familiar with. While it isn't a nice shiny GUI installer, it's a very effective menu based text installer which is both efficient and logical. I doubt most people would have much trouble with the installer.

The hardware detection was excellent. I use a laptop and some (many) distros have some trouble in properly detecting and configuring aptop hardware. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Ubuntu detected and correctly configured everything. Graphics, LCD monitor, pcmcia ethernet card, everything. I didn't have to tweak a single setting. Xorg even configured correctly! Amazing.

The default (and only) window manager is Gnome 2.10 (the newest) with a very nice clean looking desktop. The brown theme takes a little time to grow on you and you can always change it if you really hate it. And if you don't like Gnome, you can always install Kubuntu which is the KDE version of Ubuntu, or simply install KDE to your Ubuntu system.

There are some very handy tools included including an update notifier that lets you know if there are new updates availale from the Ubuntu/Debian repositories. Synaptic is the GUI frontend to the apt-get package manager and is very nice.

The packages included by default are a pretty darned good selection and include Open Office, Firefox, Evolution, and many others.

Over all I have to say that I'm very impressed with Ubuntu. They've done a great job in making a distro that is very user friendly, stable, has fresh versions of applications, and very dedicated to the open source philospy.

Their product tag line is "Linuu for Human Beings" and I'd say it's pretty appropriate here.

ubuntu is a fine distro based on debian
i do not have very fast conncetion at ny home,so i depend on offline downloads.so i am not ablke to use apt-get very much which is very much required to work on ubuntu as u need to install a lot of packages
and it lacks basic mp3 support so u need to get those packges initally also,not a big deal of u have some good internet connection

ubuntu has a good desktop which is nice and stable and the environment of debain.
i am waitng for CDs of all popular ubuntu packages which will be bundled in some CD,so that we can have the popluar packages without using apt-get

The install was trouble free, It has a good partition manager to which will automaticly partition free space to get you ready for installing. I had heard that dual booting windows XP could cause a problem but Grub is auomaticly installed as well and takes care of that. you just have to answer a few questions.

The packages included will let me do everything I want. Open office for work, firefox and thunderbird are included, and a few games (most of which keep beating me on the lowest level). There is also image editing software and Audio players/editors the one criticism I can think of about the packages is the fact that no Audio or video codecs are suplied and I have not go around to downloading them for reasons explained below.

It is rather Ironic that I am typing this linux review in windows, all of my hardware was detected, except my PCMIA WiFi card (AMD Am1772), which I have still not got to work, as this is my only means of conecting to the internet the extra codecs I need will either have to wait untill i can get it working or I will download them in windows.

In short, if I could get the wifi card to work I would use Ubuntu over windows most of the time, I would recomend it to other people but only if they don't have an AMD Am1772 card (or maybe you could get it working and tell me how!).

All hardware was detected, with backports repositories you have all new packages avalible, I love names of new versions

Cons:

I had some problems with Mplayer pluin for mozilla firefox

I have Ubuntu installed since it's first version 4.10 Warty. And I didn't look back since then. I totally forgot WinOS.

Hoary is better then Warty. It comes with some futures wich comes handy for every day user. You have Update manager who keeps your system upto date. You have new color sheme. And a lot more supported hardware.

For now my only goal with warty is to change my momm to think Linux. And with Ubuntu I can say its perfect distro for newbie. And its great distro for LinuxGurus.

Some of users do not like default brown sheme. I like it a lot. I love version names. Warty Hoary and Breezy.

So keep on rollin.

P.S. If you have problems with I don't know Mplayer, like I did, or WiFi please visit www.ubuntuforums.org There you can get a lot of help for Warty and Hoary.

Over the years, I've come to appreciate simple, but flexible installs. I like to be able to customize things, but I no longer receive joy and satisfaction from spending 4 days recompiling everything from scratch, just to have a system I can read email and browse the web on.

Ubuntu's install was very quick, but not very flexible. They have a basic package you are going to get, and it includes a whole lot of things I will never use. I was pleased that installing dual-boot with Windows XP home worked well, even though I rarely ever use that beast anymore.

What made me switch from Fedora Core 3 to Ubuntu on my laptop, were that I could not get Kismet working under there (patches for modified orinoco drivers wouldn't apply), and the constant problem with bugfixes and updates breaking things. When an update broke all sound, I gave up completely on FC3 and started looking for a new distro.

The only problems I have had with Ubuntu have been with re-configuring ethernet and wireless networks, power monitoring, and conflict between alsa and esound.

The network config wizard worked the first time, but after that changes seemed to be ineffective. I read the manpages and figured out how to hand edit /etc/network/interfaces to make it do what I want.

On my Sony Vaio laptop, the power status is not monitored properly, and even though it IS plugged into AC, the system was thinking it was on battery, and configured the hard drive to spin down when idle for more than a minute. Renaming /etc/rc2.d/S99acpi-support resolved that.

When I first logged in, the window manager makes pretty sounds, but gaim, kismet, and java apps (like pogo.com games) were not able to play any sounds. I learned from the ubuntu support forums to disable the esound server (system->preferences->sound), and everything else works. But now the window manager doesn't make any sounds. I guess someone has to figure this out yet. Also, when I play streaming music in the background, using XMMS (cause the Rythmbox user interface just plain sucks), no other apps can make sounds.

I do like the way they setup sudo by default, for all standard system admin tasks. No more su-ing to root!

And I like the update manager. Simple, flexible (letting you choose to download only or download and install, whether you want details or just a progress bar) and so far, it's working great. One of the things that frustrated me about FC3 was that update downloads, when they worked at all, were slow as heck, and it always paused after downloading, requiring you to click a button to do the installs. I would leave the PC running overnight to do the downloads, then have to wait in the morning, after waking up and clicking the "proceed" button.

I've installed Ubuntu on two systems, one laptop (for daily internet use and wardriving with kismet) and onea old desktop (for running snort/mysql/acidlab monitor my cable modem). It's working well in both cases. I do wish I could find ATI accelerated X window drivers, so my laptop could play movies more efficiently.

All of the packages I wanted to install, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, ImageMagick, GPSDrive, Kismet, Snort ... were all available to install in Synaptic Package Manager, but most of them were not the most current release. I ended up downloading or recompiling most of them from scratch.

The synaptic package manager works really well, but if you're not familiar with debian repositories and such, it can lead to much confusion when dependancies cannot be resolved. At least it doesn't force you to keep the install dvd handy, like Mandrake 10.1.

Ubuntu has come a very long way, for such a young distribution, but from reading the support forums, it seems to have a way to go yet, until it is truely painless for newbies to use. I plan to keep using it, because it does everything I need, and updates work rather painlessly, so far.

After using this distro for about a month, it started to fall apart on me. First of all, I had to spend about a week just trying to get basic stuff like mp3, java, mpeg support, etc going in it. Thank goodness for MrBass and his excellent addon package! Without it, Ubuntu is very basic and not ready for primetime.

My flash card reader stopped working, gnome got goofy (sometimes it would freeze when I tried to right click and get the properties of a file), I couldn't download from certain links for some reason; the list goes on. It's a nice OS, but I wouldn't call it the best anymore. Mepis is my current favorite with Mandrake at a close second.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: D/L | Rating: 4

Pros:

clean desktop, good array of packages

Cons:

iffy install, instability, not a newbie distro.

I picked up an Ubuntu disc from my tech teacher, who was giving out the discs that are orderable from the ubuntu website. I picked one up and installed it, thereby removing my previous SuSE. Having read that it was a noob distro, I was seriously disapointed.

I will briefly compare it agoainst SuSE. It's installer was inferior, less complete with less options, not as pretty, and pretty darn slow. Once installed, I was surprised to see that my windows drives had not mounted, as they did with SuSE.

My next shock was seeing what I would have to do to install new programs. And then I discovered there is no root account, and I never did find out exactly how to gewt root privelidges.

Definately NOT a noob distro, especially compared with SuSE. I'm now back to my old distro, after wasting about 3 hours with ubuntu.

Like most user/desktop orientated distros, ubuntu (or in my case kubuntu) is a joy to work with.

I come from a slackware background and find a lot of things annoying with this distro, but that's mostly because it's debain based. I am glad, however, that Ubuntu is moving away from debain's community and spreading it's wings.

I love how it detects and configures all my hardware (and on this laptop, that's hard to do) so I can spend my time working on more important things... like my website.

I did have trouble with my sound card. It worked just fine with the 4.10 release, and with a 5.04 upgraded from a 4.10 release... but for some reason a clean 5.04 install had issues with my sound card. I've fixed the issue, no problems there... just a bit distressing that it was a problem in the first place.

X11 works just fine, as it would on any distro, but ubuntu did all the work for me and I'm left with a fully hardware enabled desktop.

I give it a 9, because only slackware in my books has ever earned a 10 (see slackware 9.1). This is my second favorite distro and I hope the community keeps up the good work.

Wow. If it wasn't for Ubuntu I doubt I wouldn’t be running Linux at all.

The download and install was a breeze, the community if the friendliest bunch of folks in the world, and the unofficial guide is a big help when installing verboten packages, and the official Ubuntu forums also have great info.

The program list is expansive, stable, and bleeding edge. You don’t even have to edit the repository listing file, there is a GUI for all of that.

Ubuntu also checks automatically for updates.

There is however a lack of DVD and mp3 support with the installed release, but that is easily installed and configured with the help of the unofficial guide. Wi-Fi support is spotty, but it is with most Linux distributions.

What else is there to say? It really has to be seen to be believed. Give it a try, you will not be disappointed!

Had some problems installing xine...but that was only because I tried doing it manually (i.e too many dependancies)!

The first linux distro I ever tried was Fedora Core 2, which looked ok, had a few problems (especially trying to get it dual-booting with my M$ XP partition - thought I'd lost my whole Windows partition!), but all in all was pretty average. I then moved onto SuSE 9.2 Pro, which looked much nicer than Fedora Core 2, and worked out of the box, but I just never got used to the KDE feel...Then came Fedora Core 3, which once again wasn't that great. THEN CAME UBUNTU, AND I WAS LEFT GOBSMACKED!!

Ubuntu is the best distro I have ever tried, and I reccommend it to anyone and everyone, from n00b to guru. It is just so sleek, so exquisite in its appearance and style, so easy to use and configure, and so damn nice in general that it just has to be my all time favourite! I know there will be some who will say, "J_K9, you have to try Gentoo before you go saying things like that" or "You really must try Slackware 10.1", and even though I will try the other distros, I just have to say that Ubuntu is and will probably be for a very long time my FAV.

Ubuntu also has some great support. First of all, there is the Unofficial Ubuntu 5.04 Starter Guide, found here. This contains an overwhelming amount of information, hints and tips, and solutions for your everyday Ubuntu needs. Then, there are the Ubuntu Forums which are also incredible, because everyone there is willing to help, and they will always try to answer your question.

That's all from me! Just make sure you check out the Live CD or just fill out a form and get them to ship the full install to you (this will be done for free)!

Occasionally hangs during boot up, has trouble reading floppies written in Windows.

Had a completely hassle free install on an old 5oo AMD no name box bought at a clearing sale, picked up my network, and I was surfing the 'net in minutes. Far superior to Mandrake 9.1 which I have been using, I particularly like the adequate selection of software installed by default, just one program for each task, as it should be. Haven't tried everything yet, but so far my impression is very positive, and it will replace Mandrake on my other boxes. A newcomer to Linux would still do a bit of head scratching, but the answers are reasonably easy to find in the forum and guide. This seventy year old non geek is very happy with it!

Ubuntu is by far the best distro I've tried. It installs in under an hour, has everything I need for a desktop installed by default and has tons of packages available through its excellent package manager (Synaptic/apt-get). Add on the backports repositories, and you can get everything you might want through apt-get. Not to even mention that every package is up-to-date and updates are posted nearly every day.

Highly recommended for all Linux users, from beginners to advanced and experienced users like myself.

Superior distro, no hassle, clean scripts, suitable as server and workstation, great repositories of updated packages (universe/multiverse), wireless working good

Cons:

None

I've installed Ubuntu on several machines, ranging from high end servers to a PII 400mhz with 256 RAM, including HP and Dell laptops.

I've used 3 different wireless cards, D-Link USB 2, D-link DWL520, and built in Atheros in new HP laptop. For the USB 2 card I had to use ndiswrapper, but the other two was detected and configured (with WEP encryption/ESSID) during installation of the OS!

And there's no home like Gnome 2.10, once u get to know it. It has Excellent integration with the underlying OS, and the default install has plenty of useful utilities.

It is suitable for both newbies and veterans, as it is a modern Debian based distribution. Almost everything that applies to Debian applies to Ubuntu, so the documentation is wast.

The installer is good, with options for a server (base) install, or a complete desktop install, each with tunable parametes fed to the installation program.

The fact that it will allways be free (as in beer) and has a incredibly fast growing community (check out #Ubuntu on IRC) makes it an ideal choice for everyone that wants a user friendly, and proffesional Linux system.

I most like the boot up of this live CD. It lets you chose language, screen resolution, keyboard and what not with easy to use selection menus. I don't recall other LiveCDS having this specific feature in this way.

The desktop and gnome application bar are simple, they didn't crowd it with 100 applications trying to show off.

This OS seems to be geared towards people new to linux and older hats alike.

I'm running ubuntu(HH rel) on two machines at home. One is a PPC G3 power macintosh(how cool is that???) and one is an amd64 bit machine. It runs fast on each(faster on the 64 bit amd-obv). Getting it to install on the Mac was a trial-but that's not U's fault, it's just nasty HW.... I like Fedora Core for my servers and for my desktops, i like U. It comes with lots of goodies pre packed and getting more is easy by way of apt or synaptic.sudo-ing takes a bit of getting used to if you're used to su - but it's just as cool. I'm fairly new to Linux, but leanring quickly, and the new ver of Gnome that HH has feels the most comfortable to me yet. It's dual boot detection and repartitioning ability is the cat's meow, not that easy with FC. It's so far a great os, i inparticular like the remote desktop app that does RDP, VNC, etc. I can use it to connect to any machine(windows or linux) in my house, very cool indeed.

I enjoyed Ubuntu 5.04 because it was easy to set up, and had only one cd to download, but it has problems ejecting cds unless I type su eject. Although most have a live cd, that is one feature I enjoy.

I am using the AMD64 bit version of kubuntu which is just ubuntu with kde enviroment and it is great. The install was the cleanest i've seen in a distro yet and i am using an nforce4-sli motherboard with two nvidia graphics cards and a sata hard drive(not a common configuration yet). the installer properly found my hardware and configured my system, i was impressed. I had tried to install gentoo amd64 and SUSE 64 bit and it was a nightmare. i finally gave it up. this was not only the only distro that actually installed on my system but it was easy and did it correctly. The only thing i dont like about it is having to use packages to install programs. My experience with distros that do that has not been good. I prefer to compile my own programs and i typically use slackware as my distro of choice. However i must say that my experience with this distro so far has been very good. It is a well polished and stable distro and would recommend it to anyone.

Me being a real newbie to any type of Linux, I must say I love Ubuntu. FC3 was the first distro I ever tried. The experienced was very mixed indeed, ranging from a bad Xorg.conf to no sound. Oops. I didn't mind installing from .rpms . They're still better than compiling from source.

A friend of mine never gave up on Linux (a madman I called him after FC3) and soon he must've knocked me out witha brick and made me install Ubuntu. My jaw dropped onto the floor and I could see the 'I told you so' look on his face.

After picking my jaw back up, I saw Ubuntu was brilliant. A clean GNOME interface (I much prefer it to the glossy KDE), loads of packages bundled, easy install (might have made it less scary if it had a GUI, and most importantly, apt-get. I know, if there's no internet connection it's a bit tricky, but if there is, it's a breeze. The Unofficial Ubuntu Starter's guide quickly gave me DVD, a lot of audio and video formats ready to play.

I really recommend this distro to a newbie who just wants to get some stuff done. Then again, I'm one myself...

I ordered this CD from the Ubuntu website, which is FREE and they pay for the postage (expect a few weeks to get your CD). The coolest thing of all, you can order many CDs at once and there is still no cost.
The distro. itself is very simple. I am currently using it to be a file server on my modded Compaq Deskpro. I store files from my G5 iMac with out any problems. Ubuntu has great hardware support and the installation is very simple. I am a big fan og GNOME, so naturally I thoroughly enjoy Ubuntu. For those who like KDE, try Kubuntu.
I would highly recommend Ubuntu to anyone that is new to Linux or even wanting to try Linux. If you order your CD from the website, they will ship LiveCD's with every CD, so you do not have to install Ubuntu before you try it.
Overall, an EXCELLENT Linux experience for any human being.

For ease of detecting hardware and setting it up, it is fantastic. I loved debian but was often lost searching for howto do something. Ubuntu got it all right first time around and there are fantastic forums etc that assist should you need it.
I have a desktop and laptop running ubuntu and am as pleased as punch with how they both work so easily.

The only down sound which is for all of linux, is the blighters at java, flash, real player etc who don't have open source stuff - my web browsing suffers a little but I refuse to install anything other than the simply aptitude way (or synaptic if you want to).

I use Ubuntu since autumn last year. Initially I was a bit taken aback by teh lack of a rootaccount, but understand now the reasoning and have no caus eto object.

I love the clean GUI, the lack of thousands of useless programmes in quadruplicate and the huge amount of programmes available via the repositories.

My preferred lot of programmes is slightly different than the offered one but adjusting a new install takes a few minutes on synaptic and install via console as "expert" is fine too.

Under the hood ubuntu is very clean too, making it very easy for a relative newbie to find his way around.

There is little or no need for console magic s if one is disinclined, but as I said, the distro is under the hood so well layed out that CLI configuration is very easy to learn and understand.

Having said this, not much of this is required as the install is very clean and complete usually, even on laptops.

Initially (up until February 2005) I found it still occ unstable, but now am perfectly happy with how things are.

I run warty on one Dell Latitude 505, hoary on an ibook G4 and an AthlonXP 2.4Ghz Desktop and hoary-baseinstall as a webserver on an old Dell Server (PIII based)

Only the firewall is on something else - smoothwall.

I have it also installed on some 5 or 10 other computers (PI - PIII) either as a base install with XFCE4.2 or as normal gnome, depending on speed and Ram. These computers went to a charity for Malawi. I understand that it is well liked.

Clearly a very superior distro--one of the best!!! However, I rate this distro a 9 instead of a 10 as I had problems updating the software as it refused to install updates that it said had an invalid or incorrect public key and so I would have to manually install them at the command line one by one and installing 500 updates or 300 as the case may be is a pain. The hardware recognition and the graphics card and monitor configuration are impressive. It did not have a blank screen on my laptop [very laptop-friendly] like other distros. Also I did NOT like the new Gnome desktop--it STINKS big time!!! I do NOT like 2 panels on my screen-one up on top and the other on the bottom. It did not leave me any room for my Netscape 7.2 web browser or any windows I opened. Only Debian Sarge and Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux 7.3 had no blank screen problems on my laptop. FC2 needed a little tweaking to cure the blank screen problem on my laptop. I returned to FC2-i386 as Ubuntu had problems downloading and verifying updates otherwise I would have stuck with it. FC2-i386 is the most stable and problem-free of Fedora Core distros. Red Hat Linux 7.3 would have been my choice as well as it is a superior distro but I wanted something more modern but I sure loved it. Debian Sarge on my laptop had no blank screen problem and I loved it BUT...it was somewhat buggy as it would act crazy when I would do something I forgot what and unexpectedly logged me out after doing something. Also my sound card would not play and the update problem with invalid public keys and I did not feel like manually installing about 500 updates one by one. Other than that I loved Debian. Fedora Core 2-the 32-bit version is the only version of Fedora Core that is reasonably stable and problem-free. Red Hat Linux 8 to FC1 and FC3 to FC4 are just too unstable and too buggy to recommend for my laptop. The only ones I recommend are:

Now as for Red Hat Linux 9; I do love it but not on my laptop. I would recommend it on 32-bit systems with no LCD monitor and a graphics card of 128 MB onboard RAM or less; it would only recognize 128 MB of 256 MB of RAM on my Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 agp graphics card. Other than that the only distro I would think of having is Linux From Scratch. That is, build your own do-it-yourself Linux distro.

Clearly a very superior distro--Ubuntu 5.04. I hope Ubuntu 5.10 fixes the minor problems. AND...also get rid of the double panels on the Gnome desktop or else provide the look and feel of FC2, Debian, Ubuntu, and Red Hat Linux 9 and let the user choose which look and feel they would like. Otherwise a wonderful distro! Gets my vote.

Also, my brother says the exact same things I say about these distros and it really surprised me that we would have the same exact opinions. Everything I said here, he said the same thing to me over the phone and he was not surprised when I told him that I had the same opinions. Coincidence or just plain amazing? I don't know. I love Linux and I just purely hate Windoze and Microsoft and my home is Microsoft and Windoze free for about a year. Long live Linux!!!

Ubuntu - Hoary has been my first desktop debian-based distro, and after a month I'm still loving it, everything is running so smoothly. I currently have it running on my two desktops.

Previously, I have used Redhat, Mandrake, and Suse, each running KDE. I had enough of Suse after having a recurring problem with the Yast package manager and a seemingly simple problem that would not resolve. Others at my new work were using ubuntu, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

The other folks were right about the installer--the least customizable I've ever used (pretty much just asks for language and if you're OK with the hard drive setup they present), but I could care less. Everything is integrated well enough that I only had to install some development tools, and all the other niceties were already setup.

First, the debian package management is a welcome change from the rpm-based systems I've used before. I'm enjoying the huge amount of people contributing to that system, instead of the seemingly more limited and slower updates for suse.

Second, I had tried Gnome some time ago and did not like it for some reason. Gnome is installed standard on ubuntu--I was going to install KDE on top of it, but then gave it a couple days to see how I liked it. I found myself liking gnome more than KDE, somehow. It seems to be a little cleaner and faster. This has been confirmed by installing ubuntu on my old 400 MHz junker, which was relatively slow when running suse/KDE (particularly when going into Yast via the GUI). Maybe that's something I could have tweaked more, but I'm not interested in doing a lot of tweaking. I'm happier when stuff just works. In that vein, I'm not sure what they're using for hardware detection (I heard Knoppix-style maybe?), but its been able to autodetect everything I've thrown at it so far (various mice + keyboards, an old Mac drive, etc).

So I do still need to get the windows video codecs setup, but haven't really tried yet. I had some issues using xmms for mp3s, but I'm doing everything through Music Player now, which works great.

In regards to a previous review, if you don't like the two toolbars in gnome you can change them. I pulled both mine down to the bottom (drag & drop), but kept them separate (which I happen to like.

Seems to do a pretty good job of hardware detection, though may be there wasn't as many configurable options as I would like during installation--for example
it identified my laptop display as 1024x768 but did not gave me a chance to change it to the higher resolution flat panel connected to it (in the end I found that I had to run 'dpkg-reconfigure' afterwards). Also no real choice of
software packages, but I think the idea is to install a basic working system from the CD then (if required) download the rest later.

I had to install several PCs in a hurry and did not get much time to read whatever online documentation may be available, and as a consequence was caught out in a few places (had intended to install FC4, but found that this didn't even boot our batch of new Viglen PCs).

- During installation it hung whilst configuring apt.

- On my second attempt (in 'expert' mode) I choose not to configure apt and was left with a /etc/apt/sources.list file that had just an entry for the CD--I didn't have clue what other repositories are available (a Ubuntu equivalent to Mandriva's EasyUrpmi would be nice).

- Realised that it must be problems installing behind a proxy server. Third attempt, configuring apt but not accessing the Internet leaves you a reasonably complete
but commented out sources.list that you can uncomment and update later, after setting $http_proxy.

- Initially none of the gui admin tools worked. They prompt for a password, but was invalid no matter what you entered. After a long (and very frustrating) while realised that sudo lies behind most of these tools, and /etc/sudoers wasn't configured with any users (read on a posting somewhere that this may be to do with installing in expert mode).

Also found it quite difficult working out the names of packages to enter 'get-apt install <package-name>', for example gvim, which I use a lot, is in the vim-gnome package. Eventually I realised that www.debian.org had an easy to use page for searching packages by name or file.

Finally, NTFS partitions were not mounted, but you could do so by editing /etc/fstab and/or running the usual mount command (which I could never remember).

But despite all the above I think I rather like Ubuntu. Its probably no more troublesome than many other distros and I think I'll continue to use it on desktop systems.

I have always wanted to make the permanent switch from windows to linux and have always monitored distrowatch for different types of distro that would fulfill that.

The last distro that i have tried was Fedora Core 3. I'd say it was nice but it keeps breaking up on me specially when i upgrade some packages. Then came the ubuntu cds i have ordered from their website. Since i have an existing linux partition from my FC3, i just refromated it and installed ubuntu on it. The installer was very plain (text based) but it did really well and detected all of my hardware except for my webcam. I really like KDE as my desktop but i have no choice since ubuntu doesnt have it and i can't download kde since i have a limit on my internet usage.

So far its been a month since i have not used windows and i have transfered all of my files to linux including my apache-php-mysql. Not once did i get a frozen screen unlike fc3.

If they would say that ubuntu is a newbie distro then maybe it is but it did fulfill my permanent switch.

I wont say that everything is smooth cause i did encounter some problems like I cant seem to make beagle to run. And the Openofficeorg2 beta is very old and there is no base. (Anyways i have MS Access XP running without any hitch). And i did encounter problems during my first installation using the 64 bit edition.

I switched from using redhat9 on a old system(still have it) to suse 9.3 on a amd 2800+(64 bit) system..took me only 3 days to make the switch to Ubuntu..the smallest distro i found(just 1 cd while suse is 5cds!!) with 64 bit support.. installing was as easy as anything i have seen before. no problems with hardware detection at all. the ubuntuguide(http://ubunutguide.org) helped me get whatever i needed up and working. community support is great(www.ubuntuforums.org). on the whole, a great distro to stick with(though i am tempted to make the leap to gentoo :D)